


This is Feeling

by AlwaysLera



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Clint Feels, Deaf, Deaf Character, Deaf Clint, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Feels, Fluff and Angst, Maria Hill is my secret favorite, Maria and Natasha are friends, Natasha Feels, Natasha is not a robot despite what some people may say, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings, hope is a feeling, some people are just emotionally stunted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-22
Updated: 2013-01-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 10:17:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/649507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysLera/pseuds/AlwaysLera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha is not emotionally stunted. She understands feelings. They're just chemical equations in the brain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Natasha does  _not_  have emotional problems. Or, at least, she certainly did not have them before that SHIELD psych suggested she had emotional problems. They were required, Hawkeye and herself, to attend a joint psychiatric debrief after a mission went bad and both agents who were their backups were killed (knives and throats don’t mix, not unlike Natasha and psychiatrists). Natasha liked both Utley and Hamish, don’t get her wrong, but they died because they disobeyed Clint’s orders and they nearly got him killed in the process, which makes them a little closer to unforgivable in Natasha’s mind.

             _“Do you see,” said the psychiatrist in a gentle, encouraging tone that made Natasha want to drive her big toe into his throat with force, “how blaming dead people only serves to alievate your own anxiety and guilt? The dead cannot carry our blame.”_

 _Natasha did not say,_ I don’t need them to carry my blame. I carry the blame of people after they died and managed well, didn’t I?  _She did not say much. She crossed her arms and stared distantly into the psych’s eyes. She knews better than to play him, to seduce him, even a SHIELD psychiatrist who may not be immune to her beauty would call her out on that. But she could stare at him in that absent way that freaked people out because they began to imagine what she was imagining and no matter how far they were from the truth, she won. She would always win._

 _Next to her, Clint shifted, sticking a pen down his cast on his left arm and scratching at the healing skin beneath the bright green plaster. Written on his arm is_ I Am Not Allowed To Hit People With This. Please Tell Phil If I Do _and that has been enough to keep others from signing his cast in an absurd tradition that Natasha does not understand but participates in. Under the top of the cast around his upper arm, in a very small black letter, it just says,_ NR _and she noticed that he penciled a heart around it._

 _She flicked him with her hand and signed,_ I do not heart you.

 _He grinned and signed back,_ Of course you do. It says so, right here on my cast.

_The psychiatrist sighed. “Denial keeps you in a child like state, Agent Romanov, which, given your childhood—“_

_Natasha stood and left. She had enough. Behind her, Clint rose fluidly, his balance unaffected by the additional weight on his left side. She heard him say something faintly to the psych and then he was behind her, closing the door, and walking with her down the hallway._

_She turned to him and signed,_ I am not emotionally stunted.

             _His eyes were grave. He said aloud, quietly,_ Emotionally stunted and emotionally guarded are different and the dickwad didn’t know the difference.

             _She closed her hand around his, let him walk with her back to her apartment, demonstrative and open. It is her gratitude._

            She mulls over the session for a few days, trains with it in the back of her mind, watches other people’s faces in debriefings, strategy meetings, security tests, the mess hall. She watches for the ways they understand human emotion and the display it. She understand this. It’s like math for her: there is a calculation. Their emotions + her needs = her response. It’s very simple. But it is different to think about whether she could school her face into the same expression if she  _meant_  it. When Natasha is given bad news or good news, she is calm and neutral, always, because she doesn’t know how to react until she sees the other person’s reaction.

            Phil sits down next to her in the mess while she is reading over the day’s international news over a cup of coffee. His face is gentle and sad. He always looks like this. Natasha wonders what she always looks like. He slides a portfolio over to her. “An assignment. You don’t have to take it.”

            Natasha lifts an eyebrow. “That’s unusual.”

            He shrugs and says, “It won’t be easy.”

            Natasha opens the briefing material, looks at the first sentence, and shuts the folder with a palm on top of it, as if to keep it from opening on its own accord. She exhales slowly. She says, “Sao Paolo.”

            He says, “It’s beautiful this time of year.”

            “Who is on my team?”

            He shakes his head. “Just you.”

            Natasha fingers the edge of the folder. “You told Clint already.”

            Phil gives her a quiet smile but only with his eyes. “I spoke to Clint about the last mission, the psych eval, and whether he thought you were capable of going on a mission alone after a mission gone bad.”

            Natasha schools her face to look neutral. “What did he say?”

            “That you do whatever you put your mind to, and that he can’t tell me anything because you’ll kick his ass.”

            Natasha’s mouth curves into a very small smile that Phil thinks she reserves just for all things Hawkeye. She says softly, “Smart man.”

            Phil nods. “Think about it. Get back to me.”

            Natasha looks up at him as he stands. “Do you think I’m emotionally stunted?”

            “I think you wouldn’t know a feeling if it danced naked in front of you and shot arrows at you,” Coulson replies dryly.

            Natasha flinches. “I know feelings.”

            “What’s this you are feeling right now then?” Coulson asks.

            Natasha knows what she is feeling right now. It is a catalog, a list of symptoms. She feels: tired and achy from her morning run, the desire to get to the gym again, concern over the latest rounds of security tests on a SHIELD facility north of Seattle, confusion over Coulson’s facial expression, and a strong pulsing refusal to open the briefing material in front of her.

            But she suspects this is not what Coulson means. He gives her a sad smile, touches the top of her head affectionately as he leaves, and she is left staring at a red folder with images in home that fit too close to her heart.

            “I have feelings,” she says aloud to reassure herself.

            Maria Hill sits down at her table and snorts. “Right. All you feel is the desire to beat the pulp out of innocent people.”

            Natasha’s lips curl upwards. “I didn’t lay a finger on Darcy. She’s all yours.”

            Maria says, “She can’t even walk right.”

            “You have only yourself to blame,” Natasha waggles, letting her eyes glint wickedly at her friend.

            Maria throws a French fry at her which Natasha caught and ate. Maria rolls her eyes. “Go beat the shit out of Clint.”

            “I like that idea,” Natasha announces, taking her cue. She stands and says, “I’ll go easier on Darcy tomorrow.”

            “Thanks,” Maria mutters, her eyes back down on her own report now.

            Natasha picks up her red folder and walks back to her rooms where she is sure Clint is filching from her library of old movies while he cleans his bow. If there is one thing Hawkeye is, it is meticulously and highly regimented. He stuck to a schedule like glue and apparently ten am after working out was “Sit in Natasha’s apartment and Clean my Bow and Use her Netflix/Movies” hour.

            She isn’t disappointed. He’s disheveled after his post-workout shower, his hair sticking up at odd angles, his knees holding his bow steady as he carefully eyes up the string and rubs resin into it. It’d be erotic if she didn’t have something to ask him.

            “Mission anticipation is not a feeling,” she tells him, dumping her gym bag on the floor, tossing the mission brief onto the table, and carelessly pulling her shirt over her head and peeling off her pants on her way past him to the bathroom.

            He glances up at her, blinks, his eyes running down her, and then he returns to his bow. He says evenly, “No, it isn’t.”

            She starts the shower, leaving the door open. It isn’t an invitation, and she knows that he won’t take it as one. She wants to continue the conversation. She unwinds her hair from its bun and shirks her bra and underwear into a pile on the floor. She steps under the warm spray of water and exhales slowly.

            “And refreshed isn’t really a feeling is it.”

            “It could be. But I don’t think that’s what they are talking about.”

             _They._  It is an us versus them thing then. Or maybe, a Natasha versus the psych and Phil thing. She isn’t sure what he means. She dumps shampoo into her hair and lathers it up into her hair.

            “I know I feel things. I have to, don’t I?” she asks him, and she can almost hear the quake at the edges of her own words. Almost. She thinks she controls it enough.

            He appears in the doorway, watching her with his arms crossed over his chest. There is no lust in his eyes, but Clint always had better control of himself than anyone ever gave him credit for. He says quietly, “Right now, what you’re feeling is any of the following: lost, vulnerable, scared, or confused.”

            Natasha tips her head back and rinses the shampoo from her hair. Her first instinct is to roll her eyes at him and tell him that she is Natasha Romanov and Natasha Romanov does not  _do_  lost, vulnerable, scared, or confused. Natalie Rushman or any of her alias might, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t  _do_  those things but maybe she  _feels_ them. She tries each on for size in her head.  _I feel lost. I feel vulnerable. I feel scared. I feel confused._

            She says abruptly, “Confused.”

            She lathers up her skin with soap and looks over her shoulder at him. He is still watching her with a careful, neutral expression. She says, “What are you feeling right now?”

            “Concerned,” he answers immediately. “I think you’re more out of sorts than you realize, and I realized, and I don’t know if I need to talk to Coulson about whether you’re fit to take a mission by yourself or not. Especially one that has to do with hospitals and children.”

            She casts him a dark glare. “I am fine to go on a mission. I’ve gone on missions feeling more out of sorts than this.”

            “Yeah, but you don’t have to this time,” he isn’t arguing, just positing the counter-argument to her own.

            She turns off the water and steps out of the shower. He takes a towel off the wall and wraps her in it, pulling her close and kissing her damp head. She presses her palms against his chest and closes her eyes. She almost says,  _I feel safe_ , but she doesn’t say it and she doesn’t know why.

            That night, when he is kissing his way down her body, and she feels that anxious tension building in her body when he reaches the inside of her thigh, she pulls him up to her mouth again and he murmurs against her,  _That is a feeling. Exposed is a feeling._  And when she comes around him, like rain falling against a battlefield in the angry aftermath of war, she whispers back,  _You make me feel whole,_  and he crushes her against him as he finds his own release.  
  
She still does not understand feelings, even after that. She does not understand what she feels when it is late and she is awake, and Clint is asleep, snoring at her side, his nose resting on her arm, his lips against her skin, his bright green cast strangely alien against her pale skin glowing blue in the darkened room.

            Feelings, she decided, are more complicated than the beings that possess them. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You're an emotional blackhole, aren't you."

The following morning, she waits for Maria in the mess hall but Maria has not shown yet. Natasha texts her,  _where are you_?

            Maria’s reply text comes immediately,  _stupid strategy meeting for future mission, new teams to handle, the usual. It’s Manic Monday Meetings with Fury._

            Natasha’s job does not involve days of the week and she forgets that others’ do. She replies,  _when are you done?_

_Fifteen minutes. Coffee?_

_Yes_ , and Natasha waits for her. Right next to the coffee in the mess hall. She does not notice how people decide they don’t need coffee this morning. Only a few people approach her (Coulson, Harper whom Natasha actually likes to spar with, Lee who is Natasha’s favorite still living pilot) (her favorite pilot was Joe Mint who died in a pretty terrible helicopter crash. The report said he died instantly, but the report that was classified, that Barton could read and she still could not except that she totally did over his shoulder, said that he did not die instantly and he died a very slow infectious filled death while SHIELD was scrambling a recovery team that included Hawkeye. Mint had been a friend to Natasha before Natasha had friends and he and Hawkeye had been recruited by SHIELD at the same time. Clint had closed his computer, climbed to the highest safe point of the helicarrier, and she had walked around him for a few days in silence, aloof but omnipresent like a shadow, and it had taken him days to pull his shit together. Natasha understood that. But even now, reflecting on it, she couldn’t identify the feelings. Was grief a feeling?).

            Maria shows up a few minutes late and rolls her eyes at Natasha’s twitchy eyebrow. “Calm your jets. We were done in fifteen minutes but I had to  _walk_  here, Natasha.”

            “You know what Coulson handed me yesterday?” Natasha asks without preamble. She knows Maria’s security clearance is as high as Coulson’s and she knows that the handlers of that level generally know all of the ongoing and proposed missions.

            Maria watches her cup fill with coffee. “Yes.”

            “Barton doesn’t think I can do it. Either does Coulson.” Natasha says to her, watching the crowd for people paying too much attention to them. “They think I’m emotionally…” she gestures a little with her free hand, taking a sip of coffee, “incompetent and I can’t handle a mission that comes with baggage.”

            Maria murmurs a soft  _hmm_  that is as telling as her very stoic expression. She sighs and says, “Every mission comes with baggage.”

            Natasha says, “I always manage to handle it.”

            “You’ve never had two missions go to shit in a row.”

            “I’ll make sure this one doesn’t go to shit.”

            “You can’t predict that.”

            Natasha says nothing, downs the rest of her coffee and slides off the counter. She says, “Who will they ask if I don’t take it?”

            Maria avoids her eyes. “I don’t know.”

            “Who?” demands Natasha.

            “They said maybe Ruiz,” Maria mutters.

            “He’s an incompetent fuckup,” snaps Natasha.

            “You say that because he got drunk and tried to get into your pants,” Maria points out calmly.

            Natasha threw out her cup. “Like I said.”

            “If he was competent he would have been successful?” snorts Maria. She grabs a pastry. “Natasha, would you have taken anyone to bed if there wasn’t Barton?”

            Natasha considers this. “Maybe. But just sex. Nothing else.”

            Maria points at her with a cherry Danish. “That. What is that?”

            Natasha smoothes her face. “I trust him.”

            “No, really, tell me what that was, when you said that it wasn’t just sex with Barton. What’s the else?”

            “He’s my partner.”

            Maria rolls her eyes. “You are an emotional black hole, aren’t you. Come on. Let’s go down to the gym.”

            They’re halfway to the gym when they run into Clint who greets Maria with a grin and slides in next to Natasha, but doesn’t touch her. They chat about various gossip around the ship ( _scuttlebutt,_  Clint taught her, years ago, and she lay on her side, tracing a scar that ran around his side, thin and white and tight like his smile, and she looked up at him and smiled,  _that’s not even a real word._ He had smiled, relaxed a bit, his skin shifting beneath her fingers,  _No, it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a real thing_ ) and Natasha watches Clint’s fingers stretch and flex at his side, his arm hidden by the cast. He is trying desperately to keep up the strength in his forearm despite the broken bone, and for once, Natasha wishes that she could find a way to share her own physiology with him so the bone would be healed by now.

            “Earth to Natasha,” he says, bumping her shoulder with his. She looks up at his easy expression. “Where’d you go?”

            She shrugs and points to his arm, “How’s it feel?”

            “Itches. Hurts,” he sums it up succinctly.

            She frowns and takes his hand, testing each finger and the strength of his grip. She lets it fall, gently, back down to the side. “Feels strong enough. Maybe you can get the cast off soon.”

            “Then I couldn’t do this,” he points out and tries to clock her in the back of the head with it, but she sees his movements telegraphed in his body, in the effort it takes to lift the cast over his head, and she slides onto the other side of him and keeps walking.

            “I’ll tell Phil,” she points at the words.

            He signs at her, his fist halfheartedly made,  _You wouldn’t tell Phil._

            She signs back,  _Like hell I wouldn’t. I never disobey my handler, unlike some idiots I know._

            He takes her hand quickly, briefly, squeezes it, and drops it before anyone notices. “Sometimes it works out OK.”

            Maria looks at Natasha and mouths the word  _else_  and Natasha rolls her eyes at her.

            Clint looks between them and demands, “What? What else?”

            Both women give him a small indulgent smile.

            Natasha has to turn on the full smile to a junior agent, softening her stance a bit, to get him to spar with her. He is strong, taller than her, and moves with the self-possessed grace of someone who was former military. Someone had warned him about her, she could tell by the wariness of his face when she approaches, but he is too new to know she’s playing him, and it takes her less than ten minutes to pin him to the mat. He laughs, to his credit, when he’s underneath her, her straddling him with her elbow against his throat, and he surrenders. She’s a little disappointed—she suspects he was afraid to hit her because  _she’s a girl, didn’t you know_ —and she needed a good fight, but she appreciates that he doesn’t scowl at her the way some men do after their first fight with her. He takes his defeat with humility.

            She spars with two more people, including Maria. Most of the gym stops to watch that one, partially because it is two girls fighting and partially because they never get to see Maria in action. They think Maria’s more of an ice queen than Natasha, that she’s a desk agent, she’s Fury’s right hand woman, so she doesn’t go into the field. The truth is that Maria was tall and awkward as a teen, made fun of for being taller than most of the boys in her year and more gangly than them, so she worked hard to achieve the grace she found, and she worked hard to learn how to control her body in the best way possible. She was taller than Natasha by at least three inches, but weighed the same, and what she lacked in speed, she made up for in sheer strength. It is not a fair fight—few people match Natasha in hand to hand combat—but it is the closest she’ll come to a close match with Clint on the sidelines.

            Maria surrenders after Natasha pins her and Natasha scrambles to her feet, offering Maria a hand up. Maria grins as she gets up. “This? This is called feeling humble. Every time I think I’m getting better, you pin me as easy as ever.”

            Natasha shrugs, breathing a little heavier than the previous fights. “You are fun to fight. Challenging. You’re getting better. I worked for this one.”

            “Coulson suggested I handle you for the next mission,” Barton says when she ducks under the ropes and takes the water he offers her. “A way to get me out of his hair and maybe a way to help you.”

            Natasha makes a face at him. “I’ll be fine.”

            Clint has the audacity to look worried. “I told Coulson if this was my call I’d put someone else on it.”

            “You can’t keep protecting me,” she points out, swallowing a gulp of water. “I don’t need you to protect me.”

            He lifts a hand and turns his head slightly. She can see the hearing aids over each of his ears. “I’m not arguing with you here.”

            “We aren’t arguing,” she retorts.

            “No, of course not,” he moves away from her.

            She frowns at him when he walks away. He rarely walks away from her. He only walks away if he does think things are getting too confrontational. Confrontation does to Clint what crying children does to Natasha: triggers childhood memories. She likes to have arguments, likes to push people, likes that heightened emotion and tension in the room. It makes her feel alive. It shuts Clint down. He goes to a headspace where she can’t follow him. Her chest is tight and her muscles are twitching from cooling down too soon but she can’t stop following Clint with her eyes as he walks out of the gym. She lets a huff of breath and follows him.

            She grabs his arm in the hallway and he spins, his left arm raising with the cast towards her head and she ducks it, grabbing it with her free hand and dropping the waterbottle in the process. Water spills over their feet but she’s staring at him because she knows he isn’t normally twitchy like her, not in the helicarrier, and he’s already deep into that place she can’t follow him.

            She releases one hand, watching his guarded expression. She touches her own chest with her palm and watches him. She knows, suddenly, why her chest is tight and why she wants to hit him and scream at him and kiss him, and cradle him against her. She says in a low voice, “I feel guilty. And frustrated with myself.”

            He blinks at her and nods. She lets go of his other hand, picks up the water bottle, and goes back to the gym. She needs to punch things.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Is this rational? Is this reasonable? It is understandable."

Weeks later, when Natasha has come back from Sao Paolo, and she’s able to speak again, she asks Clint if he was a fortune teller in the circus. He kisses the corner of her mouth—he has still not touched her, he is still wary of her, he still asks her if she is Natasha or if she is Lucia, her cover for the hospital assignment—and tells her he only knows what is in front of him. She is tense under his fingers when he unfurls her fist that is against his chest, slides a hand onto her hip, tucks her against him and begins to dance slowly, too slowly for the song actually playing in his apartment. It takes two songs before she softens enough that they are actually dancing instead of him dragging around a mannequin.

            Sao Paolo was an explosion she set improperly, rattled by the children around her and the whole operation of kidnapping children of political enemies and performing medical experiments on them. Sao Paolo was a fire that went off in the wrong place. Sao Paolo was those children dying instead of her saving them. Sao Paolo was a missed mark, was doctors going free. Sao Paolo was innocents dying and guilty walking free. Sao Paolo was a fuck up. It was the largest mismanaged operation SHIELD had seen. She was suspended from field missions, undergoing psych evaluations, and there was an investigation into Coulson and why he accepted her word over Barton’s, because it turns out Clint was on the record for suggesting that she not go on the mission. Sao Paolo is Phil’s misplaced faith in Clint’s misplaced faith in his mistaken mistake. Sao Paolo is her ledger drenched in red.

            They danced around slowly and Natasha nestled her forehead against Clint’s neck, her fingers finding the nape of his neck. She murmurs, “I feel lost. And guilty.”

            His fingers tighten on her hip—the cast is off, his arm is strong again, he holds her close to him—and he replies, “Reasonable feelings.”

            “Feelings aren’t reasonable.”

            “Don’t confuse rational and reasonable,” he whispers back to her, his hips swaying against hers.

            She considers his words. Later, he kisses her goodnight, goes back to his own apartment, and falls asleep. Natasha sits alone in her bed for a long time, knees tucked under her chin, and stares into the dark. She has done this almost every night since she returned, burned and battered and exhausted and speechless in her defeat and the weight of her mistakes (one hundred and sixty one of them from this alone). She refuses the sleeping pills the psych offers her. She believes she needs to face her guilt every night in the face. This is the first night she thinks to herself,  _is this rational or reasonable?_  And decides it is not rational or reasonable, even if it is understandable. She slips out of her rooms and walks down the hallway to Clint’s. She codes herself in and the light spills into his room when she opens the door.

            His voice is groggy—he takes out his hearing aids at night—but his eyes are bright and alert as they follow her movements across the room to his bed. He says, “Natasha? Is everything is okay?”

            “I don’t like when things aren’t rational or reasonable but they make sense anyways,” she says, sitting on the edge of the bed.

            His hand brushes her hair off her shoulder. “Come to bed.”

            She slides under the sheets, rolling onto her side so he can see her lips move in the dark. “I am sorry.”

            “I know you are,” he replies. He slides an arm around her but doesn’t pull her close. “Think you can sleep?”

            His eyes are closed so he can’t understand her response, but she knows he is expecting to feel the rumble of her voice through the bed and his arm. She murmurs, “With you it’s easier.”

            She does fall asleep then. She sleeps through the night. Sleeps in the morning. Sleeps through him quietly sliding out of bed, kissing her cheeks, showering, changing, and going to bed. She wakes midday, feeling rested, and finds a note on the pillow.

             _Figured I’d let you make up for lost sleep. Stay as long as you’d like. –CB_

            They don’t normally spend time in his room. Usually it’s her place. She wanders around, running her fingers over the spines of his books, looking at the art on his walls (almost all skylines), and rummaging through his fridge. She finds orange juice and bread for toast and she eats alone in his kitchen in her tshirt but his boxers and it feels indulgent and frightening, like there was something new in this permission to be in his space without him. She felt like she was intruding on something.

            She is teaching herself to read music from one of his many books of sheet music when he comes back in. She hears him, though he’s trying to slide in without her hearing him, so she plays none the wiser. Her fingers run over the music on the page while she gestures in the air, trying to track the progress of the song. When she finally looks over her shoulder, he’s sitting on a bar stool just watching her, his face open like the book on her lap. She wants to flinch, wants to look away from what she sees there, but it’s fascinating, the affection and desire and lust and awe, the way it layers up underneath his eyes and in his eyes, in the knot of his brow between his eyes and the corners of his mouth.

            “Hi,” she says softly.

            He blinks, and his face smoothes out suddenly. He signs at her,  _“Hi, yourself. Feel better?”_

            She shrugs. “Yes and no.”

            He looks surprised and pleased, replies with signs again,  _“Yeah, I know the feeling.”_

            She forgot how much she loves the word for  _feeling_  in sign language. It makes sense. All the confusing parts of her do rest just beneath her sternum. She holds up the book. She signs,  _“Do you still play?”_

            “Find me a piano and we can see. It’s been a few years.”

            She closes the book and gets up to put it back on the shelf. She pads over to him, her arms cross over her chest. He opens his knees slightly and she slides between them, his hands settling on her bare arms. She kisses him softly, skimming his mouth with her tongue. He hums against her. She feels it: the way her body and mind kick into high gear. How long as it been since she wanted him? How long since she  _wanted_  to be touched?

            “I hate to turn down the offer,” he murmurs, his lips and teeth finding her neck, his hands finding her ass, his words very different than his actions, “Because god only knows I want to, but we have a meeting, Tash. Coulson and Fury.”

            She stills, though he doesn’t. “What happens now?”

            “They decide that you and Coulson both served your suspension and you’re put back on for a probation period.” He kisses her shoulder, hands sliding under her shirt.

            She catches them. “Meeting.”

            “Fuck,” he groans.

            She smiles and kisses him. “After.”

            “That better be a promise.”

            “I’m feeling generous today.”

            He laughs and kisses her softly. “It’ll go okay, no matter what. You hear me?”

            “Hear you,” she echoes.

            She has to go back to her rooms for clothes and he waits for her outside the door. They walk together to Fury’s office. Inside, Coulson is waiting quietly. Natasha feels the gathering of guilt and sadness beneath her ribs when she sees him. She has avoided Coulson at great lengths since returning and finding out that they were holding him responsible too. But he gives her a small, quiet smile, and she finds that his forgiveness is even harder to carry than her own guilt. She wants him to be mad at her.

            She signs at him,  _I am sorry._

            He gives her a short nod, too polite to sign back in front of Fury, but he accepted her apology and that’s all Natasha needed in this meeting. Fury yells at them again. The words embarrassment, training, strength, disaster, innocents, and civilians are thrown around. Natasha closes her face, absorbs with only her mind, but every word feels like a punch and she almost never lets anyone land a hit on her. Next to her Clint stands alertly, his hands folded behind his back like the ex military man that he is not. Coulson’s hands are in front of him, folded. Natasha’s hands are next to her sides. Of the three of them, she’s the one most ready to pose a threat to Fury and she wonders if she always stands in meetings this way. She carefully folds her hands behind her back and tests how that feels.  _Vulnerable_  is the first word that comes to mind.

            She shivers.

            She tells Fury what he wants to hear: that she will do better next time.

            Coulson tells Fury what he wants to hear: that he will give greater weight to partners’ assessments of each other.

            Clint tells Fury what Natasha wants to hear: Natasha is ready to start training and going into the field again.

            Fury tells them what they all want to hear: You are all cleared to return to the field.

            Natasha and Clint stumble back into his rooms, barely kicking the door shut behind them before his mouth is on hers, before he is pull her shirt over his head and kicking off his pants. He slips a hand into her pants and she finds him with one of her hands, running her thumb over his sensitive head, making him groan and duck his head into her neck. He runs his fingers over her, slides his hands out of her pants and she tastes herself on her fingers, watching him through her eyelashes.

            “Now,” he rasps, his eyes dark.

            There is no preamble. Neither needs it or wants it this time. It is hard, and fast, and over too soon, but they lay in a heap on his bed, breathing each other in, and Natasha feels like herself again and Clint feels the tension he felt between them snap and it was just him and her, the way he liked it.

            He runs a finger down her chest between her breasts onto the softness of her stomach and murmurs, “Why me?”

            It is not the first time he asked this of her. When she tried to turn the question around on him years ago, he had raised his eyebrows, rolled his eyes at her and replied coyly, “Uh, have you looked in the mirror?” and she had been a little hurt until she realized he was deflecting the question. It took him a long time until one time on the flight back from an op, he had whispered into her ear,  _“because you are smarter than you are beautiful, and you’re more beautiful than anyone I’ve ever seen. Because you’re not afraid of my darkness. Because I trust you to carry me and all of the stuff in my head when I can’t and I’ve never had anyone who could do that, who wanted to do that.”_  And then he had put his head back against the seat and promptly gone to sleep, like he hadn’t just said things to her that no one had ever said before.

            She slides a leg between his and wiggles a bit to get closer to him. She outlines his mouth with a fingertip. His eyes watch her intently. She murmurs, “You are genuine. There’s nothing fake about you. You carry yourself without pretense and you ask nothing of me when everyone I’ve ever had in my life before me needs me for something they want. It’s nice to be wanted and not needed.”

            He kisses her fingertip, rakes his fingers through her red tangles. “You’re wrong. I need you.”

            Another time, she would laugh at him. Another time, she would have told him that need was dangerous. Another time, she would slid out of bed, claiming that she hated pillow talk. But they had been partners for six years and sharing a bed for four, and sometime, though she couldn’t identify an exact moment, she stopped saying those things, stopped running away from these moments between them.

 She lets him touch her affectionately, the way lovers do, the way that people who love each other do, and she thinks about his face earlier that day when he watched her reading music like it was a book.

            She whispers back, “You love me.”

            The corner of his mouth twitches. “Yes.”

            She cups his face in a hand, runs her thumb over his cheek. “What does that feel like?”

            “It’s terrifying,” he replies, and there’s no mockery in his voice. It is hoarse, and rough, and it feels like his hand is around her heart. He touches her throat. “Your heart is racing.”

            She whispers, “Could you stop loving me, if you tried?”

            There’s a wistfulness in his voice, not sadness, and she’s starting to learn the difference. “Maybe. I don’t want to stop though. Are you asking me to stop?”

            In another time, years ago, even maybe, a year ago, she would have told him that he needed to control it because it could be dangerous, it could ruin everything, it could make them weak and him vulnerable. But she didn’t say that now.

            She shakes her head, slightly. He leans forward, brushes his mouth over her eyes, her nose, her mouth. He leans back and in the dark, she can still see the sign for  _sleep_. She closes her eyes, steadies her breathing, and lets her exhaustion take her.

            When they wake in the morning, they both have texts from Coulson. New mission. In the field. They leave in twelve hours. They get back to work.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "But what do you feel, Agent Romanov, when you look at them?"

Coulson is the one who calls her out of the field a year later when she is in Russia working alone. He is the one who tells her that Barton was compromised. He is the one whom Natasha corners when she’s back on the helicarrier after collecting the Hulk. He is the one who gets the fullness of her wrath. He takes it in stride. He calms her down. He gives her the game plan. He tells her that they’re bringing the Avengers together and she scoffs at him, and then she watches Banner and Stark and the Captain in a room together and she thinks that sometimes dysfunctional doesn’t turn out half as stupid as it looks. She thinks to herself, someone put Clint the socially awkward emotionally miswired sniper on my case, and then he brought me in, the socially dangerous emotionally disconnected spy, and we fell for each other and we worked out, for each other and for SHIELD. So she is not as worried as Fury is when he watches with her from the bridge on the security cameras.

            Fury says to her, “You’re holding up pretty well.”

            She glances at him out of the corner of her eye and says, “Sir, with all due respect, I am working hard to keep myself in check right now, so you better point me at Loki sometime soon.”

            He gives a thin smile. “Compromised, Agent Romanov?”

            “For years,” she tells him.

            He says, gesturing at the screen. “The Council told me that war is not won with sentiment. I said it wasn’t, but that isn’t quite true, is it, Agent. When you look at these guys, what do you see?”

            “Emotionally scarred dangerous men, Sir,” Natasha decides.

            “But what do you feel, Agent Romanov, when you look at them?” Fury asks, his eyes still on the screen.

            Natasha allows herself the first smile in days. “Hope, sir.”

            Fury looks at her and says, “Hope always wins, Agent. You remember that. Hope always wins. Some wars are won with sentiment if they’re fought with soldiers.”

            She excuses herself to go bring a team of emotional clusterfucks together towards a common goal. She isn’t successful—it never was her role and she hates leading teams so she is delighted when Rogers starts to take a leadership role—and she defends SHIELD in an argument which gives her a minor identity crisis, but she doesn’t have enough time to reflect on anything when Loki, and Clint, attack the helicarrier.

            She is trapped with Banner and she reminds herself as he transforms and comes after her,  _Hope. Hope. Hope._ And Thor saves her, and she thinks that maybe Fury was onto something. And it is hope that she carries with her, that somehow, she can shake the emotionalless void out of Clint’s eyes and face and she can bring back that easy smile and that soft hazel-gray and the man who loves her even when she knocks him out.

            Later, as he’s fighting off the remanents of Loki in his mind, he says to her, “You don’t sound like yourself. What did Loki do to you?”

            She stumbles over her words, watching him watch the confusion play out over her face. She can’t find the word for what happened inside of her, fighting him on the bridge with Fury’s words banging around in her skull. She settles for, “I’ve been compromised.”

            He nods, like he understands, but compromised is a big word for them, it means that she is no longer acting under her own volition, and she can feel his wariness coming off of him in waves. While he showers, she stands in the doorway, her back to him, and he says to her, “You trust me still.” And it isn’t a question. She simply looked over her shoulder, shrugged, and nodded, her arms crossed over her chest. She’s by his bed when Steve comes in and asks if she can fly a plane. She hesitates and Clint says, “I can.”

            Rogers glances at Natasha for confirmation and she gives him a small nod. She watches Rogers take her word for what it is, that he instinctively trusts Natasha when it comes to Clint and he doesn’t know either of them, and moments later, Clint has them all in the air. She prods this with her fingers. She trusts Clint. She knows him enough to know that he’s well enough to do this, that Loki is out of his head, that afterwards, Clint will fall apart and she needs to be there for it, but the others trusted Clint implicitly based solely on watching her interact with him. Was it that she trusted so few, or did they trust her so much? She doesn’t know.

            Leaping out of the crashed quinjet, she clears her mind of everything. She does her job. She still holds Fury’s words in her head, a mantra against everything evil in the world,  _hope_. She sees the team’s ( _when did they become a team again?_ ) trust in her and matches it, swallowing a lifetime of distrust, mistrust, and doubt. She tells herself that it pays off when Rogers instinctively protects her with his shield. She tells him,  _we got this,_  even when she isn’t sure they do, because she trusts him to leave them. And she remembers, faintly, the first time she stood next to Clint in a firefight. It was Budapest, they were not friends, they were not lovers, they were not even on the same side, but they were being chased by the same people. When he ran out of arrows, she tossed him her spare gun, and didn’t think twice about it.

            She tells him, “ _This is just like Budapest.”_

            And without missing a beat, he yells back, “We remember Budapest very differently.”

            And she grins at that, and keeps firing.

            Later, she misses when his grappling arrow misses the edge of the building and he falls, falls, falls, but when Rogers climbs through debris, pulls him to his feet, he will later tell Natasha that Rogers said to him, “Romanov will kill me if I just leave you here.”

            Clint told Rogers that it was likely that she’d kill Clint first for falling and then kill Rogers. Rogers gives Clint a small smile and asks, “She believed in you, that you’d come back, the whole time.”

            Natasha does not see this. Natasha looks around when Banner, Stark, and Thor show up, limping, and without Rogers or Hawkeye. She looks around the doorway and Stark says, in the kindest way he can manage, “Rogers went to go look for him.”

            She takes a deep breath, lets  _hope_  rattle around her mind because to get him back and then lose him, that would be the worst thing. She looks at Stark and nods. “Thank you.”

            Stark says, “Does he know you tried to seduce me?”

            She tips her head, gives him a small smile. “Yes.”

            Stark starts to say something in reply, but then Pepper calls, and his face goes white, and he steps away, quietly reassuring her that he is, in fact, fine, except her tower is a little broken and it’s twelve percent his fault and eighty eight percent an alien god’s fault. Natasha watches him, watches how the sharp, sarcastic, self-defensive lines of Tony Stark soften and mold around him when he talks to Pepper. They’ve come far, she realizes, since she last saw Stark. The last time she saw him, Pepper was trying her best to come to terms with their nonexistent romance and Stark was, because Natasha understood him more than she wanted to admit, trying to pretend that she was not the center of his universe. He had admitted, in emails to Natasha afterwards that they kept secret from SHIELD and their respective partners, that he had been his own center of his own universe for so long because it was the only way he could figure out how to function in the world. “ _It is literally like being knocked out of orbit and onto a new axis to have someone else be the center of your universe. It changes your worldview, pun intended. It’s unsettling and I don’t do unsettling. Sometimes it is not easy. I am not a kind, gentle, romantic person by nature and even when she makes me want to be that person, I can’t always be that. How do you love someone with every fiber of your being and know that you are failing them just for being the way you are? It is hard to carry. So yes, maybe I’m harsh, maybe I’m critical, maybe I’m self-cnetered, and maybe sometimes I stay up really late writing letters to two faced Russian spies sent by international agencies to keep me from killing myself and blowing up the world instead. Do they still pay you to read these emails?”_

            And yet, he is reassuring her, that he is safe, and yes, he would meet her in DC, it’d be better if she didn’t come back to New York tonight. He promises Pepper. He promises her and Natasha knew that he would, despite his exhaustion, fly to DC tonight just to fall asleep beside her.

            She watches him and she says aloud, “If Hawkeye died, I’m going to kill him.”

            Stark hangs up and points at her, “Not only are those the most reassuring words you’ve ever said because no one ever die under your threat to kill them if they did, but that’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

            “I would do whatever I wanted with whomever I wanted,” she repeats to him.

            He pauses and says, “That wasn’t part of your lie, was it. That wasn’t Natalie Rushman.”

            Natasha says, “Sometimes covers slip.”

            Banner mutters to his hands, “I’m going to stop trying to understand anything that happened today.”

            Rogers walks in with Hawkeye a half step behind him, and Natasha tries not to run at him. She walks, alertly, rolling onto the balls of her feet, her eyes intend on him. She signs, “ _Are you okay?”_

            He replies, his hand flashing forward from his chest, “ _I’m fine. You?”_

 _“I feel relieved,_ ” she signs back, reaching him. She touches his face, her hands running down the sides to his ears. His hearing aid on his right side is smashed, as is his elbow, and maybe his left ankle. His hearing aid on his right survived. He is trembling, from pain and exhaustion and everything. She signs to him, “ _Food. Then sleep.”_

            He signs back, “ _Where?”_

            She signs, “ _Safe house.”_

            He says aloud, a very small smile on his face, “I mean, where are we eating?”

            “Shawarma,” Stark announces. “I was promised when I died.”

            So they went to the place around the corner, and the cook fired up the oven again after looking them over once, raising his eyebrows and shrugging. And Clint props his probably broken ankle up on Natasha’s chair. She faces him so he can read her lips, so she isn’t excluding anyone when she signs, but they don’t say much. They all sit there, and eat, and she watches Clint closely but she is not sure what she watches him for. She knows that Stark is watching them, and Rogers is watching Banner warily, and Thor is mostly entertained by the amount of food that they, as small humans to him, can put away.

            Natasha swats Clint’s hand away from her food. “Mine.”

            He says to her, “People who had their minds stolen by aliens this week should get an extra serving,” but his hands say,  _“I am frightened to go to sleep.”_

            She rolls her eyes. “When was that rule stated?” and her hands reply,  _“It’s understandable, but neither rational nor reasonable. You need to sleep. I will keep you safe.”_

            He replies, “The handbook,” as he says,  _“You’re compromised too.”_

            And Natasha pats his knee, wipes her mouth and says to the group, “We’re heading out.”

            Clint says, “I guess it’d be weird to ask for a to-go box.”

            Stark points at Clint and says, “You and I, friend, are going to get along just fine.”

            Natasha doesn’t tell Stark that Clint does friends about as well as she does, but she gives Clint a quick amused smile and helps him to his feet. They limp out of the shawarma place and head to Natasha’s safe house. It is a long walk. When they make it inside, Natasha sits Clint down in her kitchen, strips him out of his clothes, much to his amusement (“making up for lost time?” he jokes, but he winces when he moves) and stitches up his cuts, wraps and stabilizes his ankle, and gives him ice for his shoulder, head, and ankle. She sits him back in her bed with pillows and surveys him from across the room.

            He closes his eyes and says, “Everything hurts, but mostly, everything I did.”

            She says quietly, “I know. It will get worse before it gets better.”

            His laugh is bitter and short. “Reassuring.”

            Natasha carefully peels out of her clothes, inspecting her own battered body in the mirror for anything that needs care. She looks at him via the mirror. “You will do what I did. You will close off your mind to anything that becomes complicated.”

            “Emotionally stunted.” He remembers. His eyes open and he hisses when he sees her. “Tasha.”

            She says grumpily, “No worse than yours. Stay in bed, Barton.”

            She dresses a wound on her head, decides her broken rib is probably the type that shouldn’t be wrapped, and then she wraps her foot and puts a splint on her ankle. It turned purple already and she thinks that she has a couple more broken bones. Unlike Clint, by morning, they will be healing and within a few days, they’ll be better. The Red Room gave her some things she didn’t mind. She leaves him to go downstairs and make tea, slipping something into his tea to make him sleep, and brings it back up. She gives him his mug and sits in the rocking chair by the window, her good leg tucked beneath her.

            “You’ll grow out of it,” she says abruptly. “The emotionally stunted stage after having your mind fucked with. It took me awhile, but I think I got the hang of it.”

            “He told me I had heart before he took my mind,” Clint says hoarsely.

            Natasha gives him a faint smile. “I think that the more complex your mind and psyche are, the more people like Loki and the people who programmed my mind time after time enjoy messing with it. We are a puzzle, like tetris, every piece with its place.”

            Clint looks into his tea. “What if I don’t come back all the way?”

            “Then we will learn a new way,” she tells him.

            He looks at her curiously. “Something is different about you.”

            She says nothing in return, just puts down her tea, and crawls into bed next to him. He puts his tea on the side table and slips down under the quilts to her. They lay with a space between them studying each other’s faces.

            She whispers, “I am not leaving you.”

            He whispers, “Please don’t leave me. I don’t want you to.”

            She tells him, “It will be hard and it will hurt.”

            He says, “I know.”

            She asks him, “Is hope a feeling?”

            He considers it. “No. Hopeful is a feeling but hope is not.”

            “I felt it though,” she admits. “I felt hope in me. It rattled around like a tiger in a cage inside of me.”

            He touches her ribs, his fingers expertly finding the fracture. “It broke out.”

            She smiles a little. “Yes. So you can feel things that aren’t feelings.”

            He sighs. “Yes.”

            She whispers, her voice pitched very low, “Like love. Love isn’t a feeling but you can feel it and it can be inside of you.”

            His eyes are guarded. “Yes.”

            “And fear,” she adds, watching him closely.

            He nods and winces. “Yes.”

            She touches his shoulder. “I felt these things when I fought you on that walkway.”

            He stiffens and says into his pillow. “I could have killed you.”

            “Yes,” she murmurs, kissing the side of his face. “You could have. But you didn’t.”

            He lifts his face and watches hers. “You love me.”

            She smiles a tiny bit. “Yes.”

            He says, “How can you, after this?”

            She touches his face. “You are home to me. Wherever we go or wherever your mind is, you are still mine and I will always be yours.”

            He kisses her palm. “The cold Russian spy has a heart after all.”

            She yawns and says sleepily to him, “Heart. Another thing you can feel but is not a feeling.”

            He falls asleep before her and she lays away next to him, touching him occasionally to reassure herself that he is here and real and hers. She makes a list of everything you can feel but is not a feeling: trust, awe, loneliness. She understands the grammatical component to the words, but she feels these things inside of her, and they are bigger than feelings. They make up the building blocks of who she is and who he is, and who they are together. She doesn’t understand it, and it isn’t rational, or reasonable, but she believes in it. She lets these things rattle around inside of her, the way that Fury’s words about hope kept her alive after Coulson died, and she hopes they’ll keep Clint and her afloat. This is only the first night in a long series of nights of leveling out. She isn’t giving up.

            She texts Maria.  _Figured out the ‘else’ part. How long have I been in love with Clint?_

            The reply text comes.  _Since he put an arrow in your shoulder in Sofia and then asked you on a date._

            Natasha lets herself compose the next one slowly.  _How are you?_

_Shitty. You?_

             _Shitty isn’t a feeling._

 _Like hell it isn’t._ This is a surprisingly tame text from Maria after a rough few days.

_Hell isn’t a feeling either._

_You’re being literal, Natasha. And avoiding my question._ Natasha regrets letting Maria get to know her this well.

_He is asleep and I am exhausted and we both have broken ankles and ribs and one of his hearing aids is gone._

_That was a debriefing, which we’ll do tomorrow. How are you?_ Natasha can almost hear the way Maria softens her voice through the screen.

_Happy when I look at him, sad when I think about Coulson, pissed when I think about Loki, exhausted when I think about tomorrow. That’s a lot of feelings._

_Welcome to my life,_  is the reply.  _Good night, Natasha. We’ll debrief tomorrow._

            Two days later, they assemble to watch Thor take Loki home. Clint is still exhausted and he’s gone twitchy and silent standing so close to Loki, not to mention the way Loki’s eyes lit up in amusement when he saw Natasha and Clint together. Natasha turns slightly and whispers to Clint, “ _I feel victorious.”_  And she gets a smile out of him, which makes what she said more truth than fiction. She smiles a bit herself, and watches the alien gods leave the planet. Now, she thinks, I feel relief.


End file.
